CPU Performance

For the full breakdown of x86 CPU performance head over to Bench and compare away. As I mentioned in our preview of the A8-3850 a couple of weeks ago, general purpose performance isn't that great. Although AMD has tweaked the A8's cores, the 2.9GHz 3850 performs a lot like a 3.1GHz Athlon II X4. You are getting more performance at a lower clock frequency, but not a lot more.

Compared to the Core i3-2100/2105 the A8-3850 really doesn't change the current state of AMD vs. Intel. If you're running lightly threaded apps, the Core i3 just has much better performance. Look at our single-threaded Cinebench scores below and you'll see a 50% performance advantage.

CPU bound gaming performance is also an area where the A8 falls behind the i3. Here you're looking at a 25 - 50% advantage for the i3-2100/2105:

Applications that are a mix of one or more CPU intensive threads still favor the Core i3 as you can see from the Photoshop performance results:

Go to the other end of the spectrum and load the A8-3850 up with CPU intensive threads, and it'll actually hold its own. As strong as the Core i3 is, there's no replacement for more cores when it comes to these thread heavy workloads. I should add that despite the A8's core count advantage, it's biggest victory in these heavily threaded tests is still only 9%:

There's not much more to be said here. The A8-3850 isn't going to set any records for general use performance. If your primary use for your PC is going to be gaming however, Llano has something to offer you...

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99 Comments

So, in other words, you completely skipped over what I posted, especially the comparisons between similarly clocked parts? In that case, you may not recall my saying that comparing to Thuban was unfairly skewed in AMD's favour and that for productivity you'd have to be mad to fork out for a high-end Core 2 Quad that is soundly beaten by Thuban under those very circumstances.

I'm not going to spend anymore time on this subject for fear it may cause my brain to dissolve.Reply

We really don't know how Bulldozer will perform. Superior in some areas, inferior in others, perhaps. Its roots are in the server domain so it probably won't be the be-all-and-end-all of desktop performance. Should handily thrash Phenom II though.

That is, if they stop pushing it backwards... if they do it anymore we may as well wait for Enhanced Bulldozer. :/ I can only truly see Bulldozer being a 9-12 month stop gap before that appears, and as we know, Trinity is going to use the Enhanced cores instead of first generation Bulldozer cores, so it remains to be seen how long a shelf life the product will have.Reply

Ivy Bridge before buldozer, oh man you really have no idea about roadmaps...Server and desktop will be there long time before Ivy, if they don't hurry with Ivy even Trinity will be ready to be launched.Reply

Given the number of Nocona CPU's Intel sold- as evidenced by the huge number showing up on the secondary market right now- Intel server shipments won't die even if they have an inferior product (again).

The faithful will buy on.

L., you seem to be betting on a jump for Bulldozer that will exceed that of C2D over Netburst. I'm not sure that's even possible. C2D only lacked a built-in memory controller, and that has been fixed. I'll be happy if BD even matches Nehalem in core instruction processing efficiency.

But I agree the more progress AMD makes, the better the market is for all of us, no matter which we buy.Reply

Yes, Llano fully supports OpenCL -- it's basically a 5570 with slightly lower core clocks and less memory bandwidth (because it's shared). On a laptop, Llano is roughly half the performance of a desktop 5570 (around 40Mhash/s). The desktop chip should be about 40%-50% faster, depending on how much the memory bandwidth comes into play. But 60Mhash/s is nothing compared to a good GPU. Power would be around 60-70W for the entire system for something like 1Mhash/W. Stick a 5870 GPU into a computer and you're looking at around 400Mhash/s and a power draw of roughly 250W -- or 1.6Mhash/W.

In short: for bitcoin mining you're far better off with a good dGPU. But hey, Llano's IGP is probably twice as fast as CPU mining with a quad-core Sandy Bridge.Reply